Treachery in Outer Space!

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #170

A crystal discovered on Saturn's moon Titan is stronger than steel and is gradually replacing steel as a main component in construction. That makes it really, really valuable and competition to win the contract for shipping the crystals to Earth is intense.

So the Solar Guard decides to have the various shipping companies have a race. Time trials in the form a trip from Earth to the Moon will narrow the competition down to three companies. Then those three will each race from Earth to Titan. Whomever gets there first wins the shipping contract.

Naturally, one of the companies cheats. In fact, they cheat on the level of sabotage and murder. 

This is the premise of 1955's Treachuer in Outer Space, by Carey Rockwell. It's yet another fun entry in the novels based on the Tom Corbett tv series.

There's actually two story arcs that eventually intertwine. One is the race, with Tom, Astro and Roger each assigned to one of the ships as an observer. The other story arc is on Titan, where Captain Strong is trying to figure out why the force field that protects the colony from Titan's deadly methane atmosphere is failing. The pilot cheating in the race is connected to Titan's problems.

There's a bit of a mystery at the heart of the novel. We know who the bad guys are from the get-go, but we at first have no idea how they cheated on the race. The bad guy bypasses his refueling stop along the way and SHOULD have run out of fuel well before reaching Titan. But he arrives all the same. How he pulled this off makes for a nice plot twist later on.

That bit of cheating does also involve a minor weak point in the story. Roger Manning is the observer on that ship. Whenever any one calls the ship, the pilot says Roger is sleeping and can't talk. Later, Roger has supposedly deserted. That Captain Strong, Tom and the others don't at least suspect that Roger might be in trouble is downright inexcusable.

But that's only one small glitch in an otherwise good story. There's mystery and action. The final chapters have the cadets getting captured and re-captured several times, but also shows that they never stop thinking and planning ways of escaping and foiling the villains. 

Treachery in Outer Space is another entertaining Tom Corbett adventure.